


starlight (hopes & expectations, black holes & revelations)

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Space Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 19:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The point is that you are First Captain Jade Harley of the S.S E-92, who is maybe a little bit terribly infatuated with trouble, and you have just had an unexpected delivery of it (the best kind! the odd yet entirely exhilirating excitement of bad accidents is you believe lessened somewhat when they are either able to be pre-empted or even not accidents at all) deposited right on your deck.</p><p>jade/vriska, as something of a strange uneven mix of ♥ and ♠, IN SPACE. one of them is a cop and one of them is a pirate of sorts and they are both firm believers in the philosophy that the best things in life do not come without a little trouble. sometimes the best things are trouble and nothing but! and that is ok.</p>
            </blockquote>





	starlight (hopes & expectations, black holes & revelations)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dottianne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dottianne/gifts).



> aaah i feel really bad for posting this thing as a treat when i didn't manage to do my actual assignment but idk i'd just been having some really bad writer's block and while looking through the request list out of curiosity i came across this one and it kind of
> 
> idk!! it just really jumped out and took hold of us and before we knew it we'd written apparently over 3000 words of more or less plotless homestucks awkwardly flirting in space? oops. anyway i hope you like this, requester! (and um i'm genuinely really sorry i didn't get my assignment done, if i'd known i was going to have that much trouble writing at all the past few weeks i wouldn't have signed up at all... to the person assigned to us [i wont name you bc awkwardness possibly] i'm really sorry, and i hope whoever took up your requests as a pinch-hit did a good job!! also thank you very much to all the pinch-hitters, its really nice of you all to take that up and oops im rambling arent i well shit)
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: attraction expressed in a very strange possibly disturbing way? offhand mentions of taxidermy and mutilation and the like... i don't really know how to describe it better than that, sorry. also somewhat graphic description of blood and bruises -- nothing really that gory at all but just in case!

  


  


(my life, you electrify my life--lets conspire to ignite all the souls that would die just to feel alive)

  


They pick her up on the backend of a star-shower, following the light, catching streams of it in her long bony fingers, those clear of a thief's through and through; she clutches stardust in her arms as they take her down, drips it into her boots, lets it cling to every line of her palms and every joint, tiny glittering drops, things like sand-grains cut from silver and rubies, that will be picked up one-by-one later and swept together again. She is an expert and it shows. She carries herself not as royalty but as overthrower, rebel, every inch of her body telling you she means to be trouble and most definitely will be.

  


is a good thing, then, that you've always had this curious affinity for trouble! What worth is life without a little trouble coming about now and again, you've always thought. Nothing--it is nothing here or there or anywhere at all. It is, quite frankly, a both very dull and very pointless world: a meaningless one. "Be the trouble you want to see in the world," was it not once said in the olden times, by ancient earthian activist Mahatma Ghandhi? Yes, you are absolutely sure that Mahatma Ghandi said that. 

  


But this is getting away from the point somewhat. The point is not of philosophy or of quotes or of old yellowed-paper history books, pages so crisp and fine (looking, outside of the light, nearly like gold leaf; time ages not quite all but at least a great many things equally, you find, dust and dirt in their gathering do not discern) you feel that maybe they would just crumble to your touch, if you dared it, confined to the execution of history, as not quite all but at least a great many things become.

  


The point is that you are First Captain Jade Harley of the S.S E-92, who is maybe a little bit terribly infatuated with trouble, and you have just had an unexpected delivery of it (the best kind! the odd yet entirely exhilarating excitement of bad accidents is you believe lessened somewhat when they are either able to be pre-empted or even not accidents at all) deposited right on your deck.

  


-

  


Your breath very nearly hitches a little viewing her down in the brig; she is sharp, so unbelievably sharp, a body constructed all of edges and corners and every joint a right angle. Her bones look as though they could've been filed down to points, showing through at her wrists, her elbows, her hips. She is skinny and sharp and made of bones with skin stretched over as close and sallow as will allow and everything about her is that of danger. (if danger was anyone's middle name, you are quite definite it'd be hers! does that make sense? no? good thing you have never really cared whether a single word that comes out your mouth makes sense to anyone other than you, then, isn't it.)

  


Her hair is swept in an unkempt mess of curls over the left side of her face, and on a moment's worth of inspection it is quite clear why: she is missing an eye! The skin around the socket is dry and scratched over with obviously old blood, blue like the evening sky risen back on Earth, the stiff used-up browning white of bandages peeking out from underneath her fringe. With unabashed interest you watch the lines of her face twist with her mouth moving, her teeth so sharp and so many biting out noise and it takes you a strange, small moment, that you suppose may have been embarrassing to someone a little less like you, to register that she is talking to you.

  


"Would you be planning to do anything other than gawp at me all day, hmm?" she says, lips twitching up in the sardonic beginning to a smile. There sit bars of unfathomable strength steel between you, her arms cuffed awkwardly at the wrists behind her back, her clothes torn and her face and arms bearing blossoming bruises from takedown, and yet with all of this her demeanour seemingly refuses to be one of that at a lower vantage point then you! She carries herself with pride that, if perhaps a bit exaggerated, you would not doubt is well-earned. "Well then, little miss cap'n?"

  


You catch yourself on the back-end of smiling, and you catch her quirking up an eyebrow with practised distaste written on her face. " _Are_ you the captain? You certainly aren't seeming to act like one. And you look, oh, a bit young for this, frankly. God, don't tell me you're just some little girl playing dress-up in her mother's uniform--actually, no, do tell me that." Behind her, she rattles her shackles. "Could use the laughs."

  


"Could you please be quiet," you tell her, very deliberately trying to intone the lack of a question mark, which is not always the easiest thing to intone but you think you do a pretty good job! You fiddle idly with the edge of one of your gloves (off-white, leather: musclebeast hide, to be precise, one you shot and skinned down yourself on the plains of Alternia), tugging it down on your hand a little closer; the thief watches you and snorts.

  


"Sorry,  _captain_ , but that'll be a no," she says, even-toned and with the bare frills of amusement creeping in again, "I have something of a notorious mouth, you'll find." 

  


"That so? Gosh, who coulda guessed." You put on your best unassuming smile, the one you now and again mentally refer to as your 'well gee gosh golly dang darn me to heck!!' one. It's the soft buck-toothed grin of a country girl a) entirely out of her depth and b) entirely unaware of it, which are both things you are very, very much not (you  _are_ a technical country girl with a bit of an overbite, though, but those really aren't the important parts).

  


You're not sure she'll fall for it, mind. "Can't keep it shut when you don't want it and can't get it open when you do," the thief says, smiling with her teeth showing; such a gorgeously sharp contrast of white against her black-blue lips! Her cerulean lipstick has smeared and smudged away and you suppose it should look an unpleasant mess but instead it's just really quite pretty--

  


black and blue mouthed like a fine line bruises smattered across her, a diamond eye and a blood-crusted (possibly probably infected) socket of nothing, a face like the embodiment of an uneasy life and it is really quite handsome, all of it! If she were game, you think with some wistfulness, you would quite like to take a tooth or two as a trophy, hang them on fine cord round your neck, scrub out clean her body and stuff it full of nothings, mount it pride of place at home-sweet-home, art for nobody but you to observe. You do not waste a second considering how disturbing that thought may or may not be to anyone but you.

  


"Right, sorry, but? You're starting to stare again--rude, how  _rude_ \--so how about we just get on with this already, then," the thief says, an idle, almost thoughtless drawl, and you somehow are suddenly very, very sure that she is not going to fall for any act you could put on. The thought is secretly kind of relieving to you even though you know it probably should not be at all. "Come on, captain oh captain. Come on in here and hit me and see where it gets you."

  


A smile hits your face, sudden, breathless--you flex fingers within your gloves, the leather creaking. "Sounds like enough of a plan to me."

  


She smiles back, all teeth, all busted-up lips, all troublesome aesthetic. All danger. You share grins feeling in on some strange joke of sorts! It is both a pleasant feeling and something of an uncomfortable one because you do not actually know what the punchline or the set-up here is, or if there is even a joke at all. You do know, however, that you have a very lively, very interesting, completely and utterly unfearing prisoner here, and you have fists. This sounds almost silly to even you in your head but you tell yourself it again and again anyway: you have fists, knuckles and nails and fingers clenched into your palms, she has intact teeth and lips and an intact nose and one intact eye and a sharp bony body and you have fists. She has fight in her and so do you.

  


You are danger and so is she! You fumble the cell-key out of the inner pockets of your jacket, working it into the lock awkward and over-quick with exhilaration, and unlocked you jab the door open with the toe of your boot, stumbling, laughing, alight. 

  


-

  


"Here's the thing," you say, soft like old-cotton and old-wool, catching for breath in the back of your throat just a little, hair falling over your face. You press down your foot the slightest bit firmer into the thief's chest, and she cranes back her head the slightest bit more to see you better again--her smile's gone now. Her mouth is a thin, firm line, unshaking. "You don't really need to talk! We brought you in as a technical stowaway catching air on the back of  _our_ ship--illegal substances on you, to boot--"

  


"Stardust," the thief cuts in, looking up at you with raised eyebrow, face scrunched up somewhat in disdain. "Just stardust, for fuck's sake; don't see what's so wrong about that, all it is is energy. We all need to make a living, stupid kid! And mine happens to come from stocks, of a sort. Fuel trade."

  


"Fuel that belongs lawfully to the empress," you continue, grinding your boot into her collarbone, just a little--she barely reacts but for an almost unnoticable biting down on the lip from the inside of her mouth. "All of it does: this galaxy, these stars, these planets, everything. You're in the empress's domain and I think you know that, don't you?"

  


She makes a harsh, irritable noise in the back of her throat, kind of somewhere between a cough and a growl. "The empress! Yes, I do know that, and quite frankly it only adds to the pleasure of plundering it all. God, the empress, her rightful imperious condescending huge bitch bluh  _bluh_."

  


You were right, then! She is indeed an anarchist, perhaps, a rebel. Some strange, small part of you is really quite glad, in a way--you've never had much attachment to the empress yourself, beyond the put-on airs of worship required for this line of work, space guarding, and although you don't particularly care enough about any sect of extreme politics to bother with rebellion, you are almost proud of the thief-girl for being such. You cannot say why other than it just suits her, really, completely and utterly. There is something inspiring to you about having that sort of radical zest whether it is over something you could believe in or not! You have always been one to appreciate the human-or-otherwise spirit.

  


"Well then," you say, lifting your foot up and off from her chest, watching her intake sharp, uneven breaths that she did an admirable job of not showing she was in need of. "All that changes is that we can now add supporting and slash or plotting political upheaval to the list! Aren't  _you_ really quite the criminal, hehe." It's but a game, of course--a game of giving and taking and really in the end you could not give a fuck if this girl is an anarchist hell-raiser or an imperial bloody drone. But you are pushing and you are going to see if she pushes back.

  


And she does! -- "Don't you know, I'm aiming for an ABC of felonies," she says, laughing a little, very good-naturedly for a prisoner, the most so you have ever seen, and you laugh with her. She is proving really refreshing company, in a way. Her lack of fear is something of a breath of fresh air among a sea of tears and fears and spinelessness. "Hey, captain, while we're getting to know one another, you mind if I ask you a little something?"

  


"Yeah?"

  


"Tell me your name," she croons, words curving out of her mouth and rushing into your skin like sand, like warm-water, something shapeless and edgeless and moving over you and you have always felt the world, that's the thing! It is why you took to the stars, a little girl on a little planet called Earth, sitting at home alone watching the skies and waiting for the birds to sweep you off your feet and take you up there with you because you always knew that you were meant to be one of them--

  


meant to be a flier, an explorer, an adventurer, meant to be out there and up there and not stuck by your feet to the earth and dirt and the skies always unreachable, untouchable! You breath in the air that everyone else would take for granted and to you it was a million different things at once, every shade of flora and every sound of fauna and to you the world sings. You hear voices in sunlight and whispers like wind and laughter like wind-chimes and you see people's eyes like stars. The thief girl is made of diamonds, rough and uncut and unclean but under it all there is glitter still, there is light, and you will brush away her film of dust and see it however you can.

  


"First Captain Jade Harley of the S.S E-92," you say, without sparing a second of thought, without question. The girl grins, sharp teeth in her sharp mouth, everything so sharp, sharp-eye and sharp-nose and sharp high cheekbones and a sharp tongue and you think you could never touch her bare-handed without cutting yourself on her, somehow. "You?"

  


"Vriska Serket," she tells you, and it sounds, it sounds like the truth and nothing but. You did not entirely expect her to answer so quickly, if at all, but now that she has you do not find yourself surprised, not really. "Alternian, troll. Roughly eight solar sweeps of age--the absolute best number to be, you know!--but oh, I suppose you don't use them where you're from, do you? Well, whatever. Figure it out for yourself, miss Harley."

  


"I know sweeps!" you offer up, refusing to pass over a direct challenge. "I've been to Alternia. Sweeps are--2.17 to one Earth year, making you... roughly halfway between 17 and 18, then! Huh. You're a bit younger than I thought."

  


Vriska raises her eyebrow up at you ever so slightly. "Got that one fast."

  


"What can I say, miss Vris! I'm a bit clever. I'm the captain of a dang space ship, I kind of have to be."

  


That eyebrow is slowly approaching the boundary of brow-height acceptability, here. You imagine it being raised over the edge, just popping straight off of Vriska's face into the air--pchoooo!!--and flopping onto the floor like a tiny little hairy fish. It is both a terrible mental image and a hilarious one.

  


"I-- _Miss Vris_? What the fuck is that supposed to be, some ungodly abomination of a pet name?" Vriska says, not bothering to hide her distaste or disbelief. It occurs to you that this is the first time you have really seen her untouchable mask drop (over something so small, too!) and it is kind of lovely. Her upper lip curls, just a little, and you can see the white of her teeth peeking out under the black, the tiniest little slip of her tongue, grey and scratchy, behind them. Her nose scrunches up in a way that is sort of really unfairly adorable! 

  


You really ought to make your mind up here, you think; is she made of knives or fucking pixie dust? Do you want to take her apart and hang her bones up at home as trophies or hold her in your arms and whisper stereotypical family-film fairy-tale sweet nothings to her? You suppose it could be both, although that is a tad silly. But then again you have always maintained that being just plain silly is a very good thing to be from time to time! So who knows.

  


"If you're going to call me 'miss Harley' like I'm some dumb stern old teacher then I'm gonna call you miss Vris! Miss Vris, miss Vris, miss Vris," you say, laughing into your hand as Vriska scowls up at you. She is still lying on the floor and you are still standing above her and come to think of it behind her back her arms are still cuffed and you are supposed to be performing interrogation here, aren't you? This has all taken a pretty odd turn but you guess you're okay with that. "Bit of a tongue-twister, that, actually! Vris miss."

  


Then, once your laughter fades, you are quiet, both of you, for a little while. You keep looking at her and she keeps looking at you back and you guess you are okay with that, too! But the silence, comfortable as it is, feels like it should be filled; you have never been one for silence. You like people, you like noise. You like Vriska. It feels strange to think of it properly, like that--you have known this girl not really even one day and you met her as a criminal and you as a cop and yet you look at her and think maybe you have waited for her a very long time. Maybe you looked at the skies years ago and light-years and light-years away she looked at the skies too! 

  


Outside, the stars burn and die and are reborn again. The planets turn and turn to infinity, and the sun boils, and meteors shower, and life and death weigh against each other endlessly on the scales of the universe, and you do not say anything; your ship moves at a speed that is essentially unfathomable to the mind of any living human, unable to be grasped in any practical way, a string of numbers only and nothing more. You think in numbers, and you count, and it has been four minutes and thirteen seconds since either you or Vriska said anything. 

  


You cannot stop reading the lines of her body with your eyes again and again and all of it is unfathomable, unfathomable as the speed of your ship, unfathomable as storms of shooting stars and planets turning and of the time and distance that the expanses of this galaxy cover, unfathomable as infinity. You read Vriska Serket in colours and numbers and she is blue, the deepest dry blue, she is eight. Eight solar sweeps, eight fingernails painted a cracked blue, eight blossoming indigo bruises altogether up and down her arms, eight times she has blinked since you stopped talking and now nine. 

  


She shifts her head back on the floor and her hair tosses, down her shoulders down her back over her face and you kiss her. You lean down beside her and you cup her chin in your hand, young and awkward and her jaw is just as sharp-boned as you imagined it to be! You press your mouth against hers, open, and her lips are just as firm and her tongue just as prying and you count the seconds until she bites you: eight. A tiny little collection of red droplets well up in your mouth and dribble out over your lips, and through a slight wince you smile, and mouths pressed together still you can feel her match it.

  


"Welcome aboard the S.S E-92, Vriska Serket," you say, so quiet, so soft, and the words spill out of your mouth like they have been a long time coming, maybe forever. You are not sure how that works but you do not have to be! That's the wonderful thing, with fate.

  


"You do realise if you let me stay you will harbouring a criminal, a fugitive, little miss space cop," Vriska says, but there is no question in it because you already know the answer as does she. Absolutely do you realise! You realise the trouble this may bring, the trouble this almost certainly will be, but--

  


"Of course! And that's ok. After all," you say, eyes closed, arms slung over her shoulders (you make a quick mental note to uncuff her after this), content like you have almost never been, "I've always said life is nothing without a little trouble."

  


You press your foreheads together, noses bumping, and it is the silliest little thing but you laugh! You laugh, and she laughs, and with the first breath intaken you feel as though you have spent your entire life underwater, and you are only just coming to surface.

  


  



End file.
